A moment passed before Vinton turned from the fire and let his eyes wander from the pale yellow heads of the daffodils nodding in the easterly May air outside to the cool tints of the Lowestoft bowl on which some Chinese artisan a century before had picked out the initials of a merchant-sailor grandfather in pale tints of blue and gold and which now stood in the centre of the table filled with sprays of the rhodora. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose there are saving complements of a sort if one is heroic enough to find them, but—well, one can hardly— What shall I say? Everything over there—I mean all sorts of what you’d call merely material objects—is being charged, I believe, with some kind of spiritual essence that is going to be indefinitely active to future contact.” He looked across the table to where Ware sat with his chair a little pushed back, and laughed. “The intolerant old Puritan thinks I’m off again, doesn’t he?” he said almost archly. Then he glanced about the room once more. “I think,” he continued, “that there is an extraordinary beauty of a kind about our old houses over here—a charm, too, although I’ve never been able to analyze it, for, after all, you know, there’s nothing in them!” “The Puritan,” he began to explain, “belonged peculiarly to the race that in England had always opposed all of what one may call the sensory elements that were of such immense appeal to the race of the Cavaliers, for I believe that the two did spring from essentially different roots. “‘A primrose by a river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.’” “What more does it need to be?” Ware protested, and “Ah! there you are,” Vinton responded. “But don’t you see, after all, such negation never created”—he laughed a little again. “Never created an—an—” “An eschatology?” supplemented Ware. “A what? What on earth’s an eschatology?” gasped Ware’s sister. “Say, for brevity, the material manifestation of spiritual things; not quite theological, but ’t will serve,” Vinton returned, and was silent; and after a time Abigail asked him what he thought of the legend of the Angel of Mons. Then it was that Vinton began to be truly cryptic. “What’s the use,” he said genially, “of talking about these things to two people who are made of stuff as splendidly solid and insensitive to the vibrations of what they’d call fantasy as their colonial pieces themselves.” Abigail sighed. “I’m sorry that I’m too insensitive to hear of these saving complements of horror,” she said. “As for Billy, I suppose he wants the facts.” “The horror,” returned Vinton, “for the facts are all horror. If it hadn’t been for the story that the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter told me I should bring home nothing else.” “Is this one of those manifestations you refuse to reveal to us?” “It is the only one. It’s no use before Ware; perhaps some time—if you will listen.” “Go on,” said Ware; “‘_si non e vero, e ben trovato_’”. “Oh, I’m not making it up.”